Just in case you feel the current administration doesn't have enough power, we find out that the CIA can take control of your iPhone and Twitter account, or watch you through your smart Samsung TV, at will. Moreover, the vulnerabilities they…Continue

[I already use several defenses against such things: a non-tracking search engine (DuckDuckGo), an ad blocker, avoiding apps with ads, and keeping location turned off on my phone except when needed for navigation. The ExtremeTech article on this also suggests staying logged out of your Google account except when needed.]

A privacy watchdog group has filed a complaint with the FTC over Google's system for tracking purchases Internet users make in person, at physical store locations.

Google announced the new service — a way for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of an online ad campaign — in May. It combines Google's search and app records with credit card purchase data acquired from third-party sources.[...]For several years, the company has been using location data on phones to track store visits — for example, to see how many people clicked on a PetSmart ad and then visited their local PetSmart.

But the new system goes further, and looks at actual purchases, by relying on in-store credit card transactions. [...] That data gets cross-referenced with information Google already has, to connect user accounts to in-person purchases.

[...]

Rotenberg says that Google has never identified who its third-party partners are, "what data is acquired or what steps they are taking to de-identify that data." Without those details, he says, there's good reason to be skeptical of the company's claims of anonymity.

He points to examples like Snapchat, the app that said that photos posted on its platform would disappear forever. EPIC challenged that claim in an FTC complaint. The FTC agreed that Snapchat was being misleading, and the company eventually settled the charges.

Rotenberg says that if Google's anonymizing practices are as robust as they say, that likely alleviate EPIC's privacy concerns. But without an independent investigation, he says, it's impossible to evaluate Google's claims that the process is fully anonymous.

EPIC also complains that the opt-out process is "opaque and misleading," [...]

Just read that the iceberg that sank the Titanic only made a very small hole, not enough to come close to sinking the ship. The reason it sank was because of poor quality rivets that popped loose when the ship hit the iceberg. Read more here:

Facebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”, according to a leaked documents based on research quietly conducted by the social network.

The internal report produced by Facebook executives, and obtained by the Australian, states that the company can monitor posts and photos in real time to determine when young people feel “stressed”, “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless” and a “failure”.

I've actually seen something similar on the web a couple of times, when a website's bare-bones "page not found" Error 404 page says that the server also encountered a 404 error looking for the [intended, customizable] "page not found" page!